Science: Greatest Treasure Hunt

News as glittering as Golconda came out of the Department of the Interior last week. The Department described what it rapturously called “the greatest treasure hunt the world has ever witnessed.”

The hunters are 350 U.S. geologists. They have bagged millions of tons of war-critical ores. WPB has just scratched aluminum and zinc off the list of U.S. shortages. Copper may soon follow suit. The Government now knows of big U.S. deposits of manganese, vanadium, tantalum and chromite—not one of which was produced in quantity in the U.S. before the war. Already the nation can produce most of its own chromite and tantalum (crucially important in a secret war job). The hunters have also discovered 3,000,000 tons of high-grade bauxite (for aluminum), new sources of tungsten, magnesium, nickel, mercury, many another metal. Not all these ores are of high enough quality to be commercially practical in peacetime, but they are good enough to assure the U.S. of an ample war supply.

The hunt has been one of the quietest and best-organized in history. Its headquarters is a big, bemapped office in the Geological Survey in Washington. Its chief strategists are a Mutt & Jeff pair: lean, untidy Survey Director William Embry Wrather, who looks like a country schoolteacher, and chubby, loud-tied Chief Geologist Gerald Francis Loughlin. Since 1938 the Survey has sent forth hundreds of prospecting parties to promising fields from Alaska to Latin America. They have hunted for copper in Vermont, bauxite in Alabama, zinc in Wisconsin, oil in Alaska. In the past year alone the geologists have made more than 700 field investigations.

Though their full story cannot be told until after the war, the Geological Survey exclaimed: “The treasure unearthed was prodigious.”